Executive Disorder: 2026 Midterms Edition

0:08 It could happen here!

0:11 That's not how we open the show.

0:13 Welcome to Executive Disorder, our special midterm election 2026 edition. But we're going to talk about everything that we can in the next hour and change. I'm Garrison Davis. I'm joined by Robert Evans, James Stout, Kevin Foster, and special Texas correspondent Stephen Monacelli. Welcome, everyone. Yes.

0:36 Welcome back to the show, everybody. Stephen, I'm so glad we made the decision several decades ago to embed you in Texas, knowing that years later we would start a media network and need a correspondent in Texas for the 2026 midterm elections.

0:50 The long-term planning really paid off.

0:53 Yeah, yeah.

0:53 We actually went and scouted you like they do with NBA players when you were a little kid.

0:58 Like, yeah, this one, this one.

0:59 Someone's going to take that seriously.

1:01 Someone's going to take that seriously.

1:03 Oh, God.

1:06 Yes, we're looking for the LeBron James of podcasting about the news.

1:11 We will get to Texas shortly. But similar to LeBron James, the elections this year saw A super tall blue wave, something that they are calling a blue tsunami.

1:26 Blue-nami, come on.

1:28 A blue-nami.

1:29 Yeah. All right, guys. All right. So, Democrats have completely dominated in the midterm elections.

1:38 They sure did.

1:39 Outpacing the polling in many cases, outpacing most expectations. They are projected to win 258 seats in the House, at least, possibly a few more. Jesus. At the very least, an 81-seat majority, the largest majority either party has had since 1992.

1:58 Wow.

1:59 Fuck me.

2:00 It's an incredible victory. Unfortunately, we'll have to kind of blaze through some of the House results because the Senate results are... Yeah, super, super important as well. But obviously the House race was kind of in the shadow of this redistricting effort done by Republicans and some Democrats. The GOP wanted to flip about 15 House seats through redistricting.

2:20 And how many did they flip? Zero, zero seats.

2:25 It's stunning. Now, Garrison, is zero a large number?

2:29 No, no. It's actually one of the smaller numbers.

2:32 Really? Oh, this is interesting.

2:34 Okay, thank you. Thank you for that context.

2:36 In fact, one could argue we've gotten into negative number territory because Democrats did not just hold on to those gerrymandered seats. They went on to flip at least 35 more.

2:46 Oh, my God. Good God.

2:48 Winning all 28 battleground districts identified by NBC. Wow. At least 11 flips in the New York Times most competitive districts. And that's an undercount because the New York Times isn't counting any redistricted district. And then another 10 flips in districts that Republicans expected to win. And then another nine flips in districts Republicans expected to win easily. A lot of those in North Carolina, which Democrats just obliterated.

3:16 Oof.

3:17 The Republican Party in North Carolina. It's a bloodbath.

3:20 North Blair-alina, as they call it now.

3:22 Yeah, that's right. Actually, it was just announced a few hours ago. That's what they're changing the state's name to.

3:32 Yeah, the Carolinas haven't gotten hit this hard since the Civil War. It's crazy stuff.

3:40 There's so many house races we could focus on. I do want to highlight it is expected. that Lauren Boebert will no longer be a congressperson come January.

3:53 Fuck yeah. God, that's... That's just.

3:58 She is currently trailing by 6,000 votes. They're still counting, but.

4:02 Hearing you.

4:03 Say that is like the auditory equivalent of biting into a perfectly cooked piece of steak.

4:09 It's just glorious. Oh, God, that feels good.

4:13 The other thing I want to mention... because we've reported on this on Executive Disorder this past year, Max Miller, the Republican congressman accused of some very horrific familial abuse that was covered up by the Republican Party in general.

4:28 Real monster shit.

4:29 He has lost by almost 10 points. He is out. Brian Poindexter is in. That's in Ohio. This was a race that Miller was expected to win, and he did not. Other big Trump House districts, we have Indiana 5, Kentucky 6, North Carolina 6, and Ohio 10, which Democrats won. These are like 20, 30 point shifts away from Trump's performance in 2024.

4:57 Christ almighty.

4:58 It's pretty incredible. Yeah.

5:00 I mean, in general.

5:02 I expected the House to flip. Yes.

5:05 And I think most people did and have like somewhere between a slim and like a solid lead for the Dems. And the Senate was kind of like there's a decent chance it would flip, but it was going to. I don't think anyone really thought this would happen. Even when the polls were showing it, I couldn't... Yeah. It's been so hard to trust them, right? Like, the fact that they undercounted the dims is certainly not... Like, I'm incredibly happy.

5:29 I just.

5:30 I couldn't let myself believe it was going to go this well. And I'm still kind of in shock that it did.

5:36 Like, this is nuts.

5:39 I felt like I didn't know what to do with myself last night. I'm so used to everything just being bad.

5:43 Yeah. Right. Like I was remembering last election.

5:46 Yeah.

5:47 I don't know how to feel good, I guess, but.

5:51 Yeah, I mean, there's obviously there's bad news as we'll talk about too, but just, I don't know. I felt like the need to take a second on air to go like, yeah, holy shit.

6:00 Yeah. That went pretty well.

6:03 Yeah.

6:03 We can talk about this more in the voter trends section, like specifically, but I mean, yeah, this is like, A total reversal of the 2024 election. Yeah. On almost every metric. Now, as Robert mentioned, Democrats were expected to win the House, not by this much. Not like this, but yeah. The tally is still being counted. So when I say they're expected to get around 258, 260, not all those have been confirmed yet, but that is the NBC projection, which they're projecting more confidently than the New York Times, which is a bit more conservative in their projections. Yeah.

6:37 They've done well enough that like the outstanding, obviously the races that aren't called yet matter, but none of them matter in the sense of determining what the Dems will be able to do or not, probably. Like the margins are so big that these like last couple of seats won't shift. Obviously it matters, but won't shift the overall battle.

6:55 Yeah.

6:56 Which is crazy.

6:58 The big question was what was going to happen with the Senate. Yeah. Dems needed to net four to five seats, getting to like 51, 52 seats. considering, you know, J.D. Vance and John Fetterman, you know, to counteract their votes.

7:11 Fetterman.

7:12 So they would have to claw back a fair number of seats. As of Wednesday afternoon, Democrats have secured 54 seats.

7:20 53, right, with Fetterman being not a Democrat.

7:25 Correct.

7:25 Yeah, Fetterman's ex-account has gone suspiciously quiet this morning.

7:29 Tragic, tragic. He's in mourning.

7:31 A lot of his friends lost.

7:32 And Democrats could win upwards of 56 seats. Jesus Christ. Between Alaska and the surprise possible Flip of the Night Mississippi, which we'll get to in a sec.

7:42 Yeah, yeah.

7:43 Between like seven, eight or nine flips. It's incredible.

7:47 Yeah, it's bonkers.

7:48 I've not seen a Senate race like this ever.

7:51 No, no, no.

7:54 It's more like I remember, I'm sure some of us who are older remember 2008, right? And the Obama election.

8:01 2008 and 98 too, I think, was another shellacking for the right.

8:06 But yeah, evidently nothing to this extent.

8:08 No.

8:09 This is remarkable. And the incumbent party tends to do worse in midterms, yeah, but not to this extent.

8:14 Yeah. No, getting possibly 56 Senate seats.

8:19 This isn't doing worse. This is like end of days. Yeah, extinction level event, to quote Ron DeSantis.

8:26 As Ron DeSantis says, an extinction level event for the Republican Party.

8:31 Yeah, thank God.

8:35 Let's talk about Michigan, one of the big races of the night, Abdul El-Sayed versus Mike Rogers. This was an open seat previously held by a Democrat. And El-Sayed... held this seat for the Democrats. He won 53 to Rogers 45, a seven point win. Nice. The entire GOP apparatus and frankly, a big portion of the Democratic establishment mobilized against El-Sayed hard on like a national level. He became this sort of like poster child of this whole election cycle. The Republicans hoping that painting him as an extremist by doing that, his candidacy could like negatively affect Democrats and races all across the country. And that did not happen at all.

9:16 Nope.

9:18 It's the same kind of deal with like, if we really focus on Hassan Piker, that'll scare everybody away from voting for the Democrats.

9:25 Didn't work. Didn't seem to work.

9:26 And if you get a look at the voter demographic numbers, seemed like the opposite may have happened.

9:31 Right.

9:32 I would be remiss to mention that Haley Stevens decided to endorse the quote unquote nightmare, her words, Mike Rogers, like two or three days before the election because of El-Sayed's anti-Israel stances and essentially threw her career away for, I guess, probably some AIPAC money. I was going to say nothing, but... What's she going to do with it?

9:54 But yeah.

9:56 She's like self-immolated as a career politician. Buy the flight to Israel. Yeah, right.

10:01 That does seem like kind of her only option.

10:04 Join Netanyahu.

10:05 She's been kicked out of the Democratic Party.

10:06 Well, Netanyahu might not be in power all that much longer, depending on how things go over there. She doesn't have to join him in Parliament. Join him in the International Criminal Court if she wants to.

10:15 Sure.

10:15 She might build a win.

10:16 Yeah. Moving on to Maine, another... race with a lot of focus. Troy Jackson versus Susan Collins, who's held this seat for 200 years. That can't be right.

10:30 Since 1776. Yeah, actually.

10:33 I mean, she very famously stood with Washington at Yorktown.

10:36 So have a little bit of respect. She's a veteran we're talking about. Signed the Declaration of Independence, Garrison.

10:43 And come election night, union logger and former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson unseated. Longtime Republican Senator Susan Collins, who defied the polls in 2020 when she held onto her seat that year. Jackson has won by about eight points, close to Kamala's margins against Trump. This is a huge win for labor and like the Bernie wing of the Democrats. And, you know, just getting Collins out of there is just feels good.

11:09 Feels good, man.

11:11 Yeah. One of the scenes that Democrats expected to flip was in North Carolina with Roy Cooper and the man who has never lost an election, going up against Mike Watley for a previously Republican-held seat. And former Governor Cooper did flip this, winning 60-40. Like I said, just North Carolina, total bloodbath. Trump won this by three. And down-ballot races, the House races, state legislature, just really, in North Carolina, it's the bluest you've ever seen. What's much more surprising...

11:46 is the neighbor down south, South Carolina, with Annie Andrews against Darlene Graham, the Republican incumbent.

11:54 Yes.

11:55 Democrat Annie Andrews lost a U.S. House race to Nancy Mace in 2022. But last night, she beat short-term Republican Senator Darlene Graham, flipping the seat formerly held by late queer icon Lindsey Graham, who served as a senator since 2003. In 2020, he won by 10 points. Trump won the state by 18 points in 2024. Andrews won by four.

12:22 So that's what, like a 22 point swing from 24 to 26?

12:25 Yeah.

12:25 Annie Andrews is like in between moderate and progressive. She ran on like a public health care option, right? Not Medicare for all, but a public option. Abortion rights, education funding, banning corporate PAC money. cracking down on congressional stock trading, term limits, AI regulation, border security, and path to citizenship while keeping families together.

12:47 Is she one of the Dignidad Act people?

12:51 I don't know what that is.

12:53 Okay, I don't want to divert the episode too much. It is a thing that like Blue Dog Dems and some Republicans, including Florida Republicans, have been trying to introduce for a long time that would effectively create an underclass of people who had no pathway to citizenship and had a right to remain. And they tend to couple this with border security. It's like a faux amnesty, almost. Okay, okay.

13:16 Her exact platform does not go into that level of specificity. Okay. I will say, coupling path to citizenship with border security has been one of the most common talking points across these swing states. Yeah. What exactly that means once they're in office is kind of a black box. Yeah.

13:35 Yeah, we have failed to reform our immigration policy for decades and decades and decades, which is how we got to this fucked up situation that we're in. So like, yeah, we're going to cross that bridge when we come to it. Obviously, I will report on it when it happens.

13:47 Another thing to cross, hopefully sooner than later, is the trans issue and the way that's been weaponized in these past few elections. And last month, Annie Andrews did release an ad directly opposing, quote, biological men in women's sports and, quote, gender surgery for minors. in response to a swath of attack ads against her. This ad is not good. This is bad. This is bad. And this is handled much worse than other candidates handled this, like Sherrod Brown, who also faced a wave of ads attacking him and the Democrats for the support of trans people. And he released an ad calling the Republicans pedophiles. That was his response.

14:28 Oh, yeah.

14:29 Instead of throwing trans people under the bus... And Sherrod Brown won. He beat incumbent Republican Senator John Husted, who was occupying Vance's seat in Ohio. Sherrod Brown's a former senator, a progressive populist. Brown won by about five points, over 200,000 votes. In 2022, Vance won by six points. Trump won Ohio by 11. Sherrod Brown, I think, handled this as well as any, better than any other kind of swing state Democrat. Much better than Josh Turek, who handled this the worst, the most kind of anti-trans one of these swing state Democrats. In Iowa, Josh Turek beat Ashley Hinson in an open seat held by Republicans. Turek won by five points. Trump won the state by three points. Remember,

15:18 there was that late polling with the infamous Seltzer poll that put Kamala ahead in the 2024 election. Seltzer wasn't wrong. She was early. She was two years early. That's the election Twitter joke. Because Iowa, not as much as North Carolina, but did shift blue and shifted blue in house races and special elections these past two years. But Josh Turek, the new senator, is definitely more of a moderate. He's a self-proclaimed, quote, prairie populist.

15:50 Whatever, man.

15:51 While campaigning, he moved the farthest to the right on trans issues. He definitely bought the hardest into this kind of gender war stuff.

15:59 Prairie populist? What the hell?

16:03 Populism for agricultural workers, small businesses, small farms. I hate prairie populist because he is a moderate. A lot of these guys are running on affordability populist-esque kind of messaging because that's really what has shown to be successful.

16:21 Mary Peltola had a pretty anti-trans ad towards the end of her campaign.

16:27 She is also one of the more moderate ones.

16:29 Yes.

16:30 This is in Alaska.

16:31 This is Alaska.

16:32 Yeah.

16:33 Who definitely ran as a kind of, I would say probably the most conservative out of all of the swing state Democratic senators in Alaska. Just like in general, like in general, the most conservative out of all of these Democratic candidates.

16:47 Like Alaska will always be different, right? Like she's one of the... Yeah, a few indigenous women who was like running for Senate and she ran some stuff on like fishing and stuff like that, which would be more radical.

17:00 Fish, family and faith, I think, were like her main campaign slogan.

17:07 Man, drop the last two, and I agree. I'm on board. Fish.

17:12 Just fish.

17:13 Just fish, yeah.

17:14 We've spoken about this on this podcast before, but we, as always on Behind the Bastard, someone holding a fish, you got to support them. But yeah, it'll be a long time. It takes a long time for us to get the votes in Alaska, so it'll be a while before we know about that one.

17:29 Correct. So we know South Carolina, Iowa, Ohio. These are all flips. Yeah. Alaska- Could be a flip in the next day, few days. Right.

17:40 Uh-huh.

17:41 Peltola's right now about like 60 votes ahead with 77% of the vote in.

17:46 Jesus Christ.

17:47 She's expected to gain.

17:48 Yeah.

17:49 Gain in her lead, but she's sitting at 48.2. So depending on how that goes, this might result in a ranked choice instant runoff. Yeah, yeah. And I've not looked into... This race specifically and the opinions that I've seen from my election people have kind of gone either way of whether that runoff would benefit her or hurt her. This is the race with the two Dan Sullivans, the Republican incumbent senator, Dan Sullivan, Daniel Sullivan Jr., the non-senator, who did receive not... like totally insignificant part of the vote.

18:29 And based on how close this race is, like I said, like 70 vote difference.

18:32 Yeah. I feel like if I had been in Alaska, I might've just like, I've no idea about Dan Sullivan Jr. 's policies to be clear. But like when you're presented with someone like either the Republican candidate or the Democrat candidate doing transphobic bullshit, like maybe you're just having a laugh of voting for Dan Sullivan Jr., Like an active abstention.

18:50 I think that's more likely than people who mistook him for being the Republican. The idea of people voting for him as a sort of joke or protest candidate is certainly possible. So that's part of sort of these ranked choice calculations. If Paltola is ranked second on some of those Sullivan Jr. ballots, that'll change the game as opposed to assuming... that all the Sullivan Jr. votes in ranked choice will go towards Senator Sullivan.

19:15 Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

19:16 And that's why it's hard to predict exactly what will happen with this race.

19:20 Yeah, ranked choices is, well, it offers some benefits, but just like it can sometimes take a little bit longer. I will say, I think it's extraordinarily condescending to suggest that people in Alaska don't understand what incumbent means.

19:33 Yes.

19:33 Like, it's just a fucking nothing burger. Like, it just, I don't know, I find it incredibly, like, snooty and condescending to suggest that people are that fucking dumb.

19:44 The one other race that we don't quite know the result yet and is possibly the most shocking result of the entire night is in Mississippi, which might somehow become Mississippi with Scott Column against Sidney Hyde-Smith, the Republican incumbent. Right now, this race is tied at 48.9 with Democratic candidate Scott Column up less than 100 votes. with about 44,000 votes to be expected still to come in. And these are going to be mostly coming in from areas where the Democrat column has performed well. But a lot of these are going to be mail-in and provisional ballots, which can be counted up to five days after the election.

20:25 So we probably won't know the results of this till like Saturday. This is super shocking. This deserves its own kind of deep dive. I did see one of Colum's ads circulating, which targets cost of living and affordability. The ad is this clip of Sidney Hyde-Smith being asked on a news show what people should do about the price of beef getting so expensive. And she said that people should, quote, pick another protein. And this ad just totally skewered, skewered her over this insane, like, elitist, like, response.

21:02 Yeah, that's a let them eat cake for half of America.

21:06 And the crux of the ad was all these, like, you know, actors playing constituents saying, pick another protein. No, I'd rather pick another senator. And that's the, that's the ad.

21:18 Amazing.

21:18 So that's Mississippi. We will learn if both Alaska and Mississippi flip in these next few days. One state that did not flip that I will mention is Florida with Angie Nixon going up against Ashley Moody, the Republican incumbent in Rubio's former seat. This race was way closer than Democrats expected. This is like a two to three point margin, just like over 200,000 votes. if Dems did more spending in this race, it could have been even more competitive.

21:48 Like the fact that Nixon did so good in Florida is a testament to her as a candidate and her like direct ground game.

21:54 Yeah.

21:55 But she got just completely outspent, like just, just, just demolished in, in terms, in terms of ad spending. But a really, I think a good show for her. I'm excited to see what she does in the future. She's a strong, a strong labor candidate. Unfortunately, a few days before the election, the head of the Teamster, Sean O'Brien, endorsed Ashley Moody, the anti-labor candidate. Get O'Brien out of there!

22:21 He sucks!

22:23 Get him out!

22:24 Sean O'Brien, fuck off. Anyway, there's two other flips that we should talk about. And it's time to put on my little cross necklace, time to revert back to my childhood Protestantism, because Methodist minister Adam Hamilton flipped the Kansas beating Republican incumbent Senator Roger Marshall by five points. Just two years ago, Trump won Kansas by 16. Marshall won the Senate race by almost 12 points in 2020. Adam Hamilton ran on cost of living, strengthening the right to organize, regulating data centers, abortion rights, spanning algorithmic price fixing, combating fraud and scams, targeting seniors, protecting their health care, term limits for Congress and the Supreme Court, and banning congressional

23:13 stock trading, and also banning politicians from using prediction markets, which is a new kind of addendum to all these congressional stock trading measures.

23:23 Sure, yeah.

23:25 The Kansas flip is, I know, something that the Republicans were increasingly worried about these past few months, moving ad spending over from North Carolina, which they kind of gave up on, into Kansas. But it wasn't enough. Now, there is one other big win for Christian Democrats. And we will talk about that after this ad break.

23:59 And we're back.

24:01 And the stars at night are big and bright, deep in the heart of Texas. I was waiting to see if you were going to do the clap, Stephen, and you didn't.

24:10 You let me down. You let me down.

24:12 Oh, sorry.

24:13 No, no.

24:14 I'm sorry. I just, you know, it's with the Zoom, the timing, it's always off with the claps.

24:20 This is the first time I have been really shocked by an election in Texas. I had come around to the fact that Tallarico had a really good chance of winning. In fact, was probably going to win.

24:31 And he did. Everything else that happened surprised the shit out of me. Yeah, we should probably start by talking about Tallarico.

24:39 I mean, what an absolute bloodbath of an election this was.

24:44 Just a disaster.

24:45 I mean, so Tallarico uniquely performed among Texan candidates, I think, in competitive races.

24:52 Yeah.

24:53 Crushed Ken Paxton by 12 points. And, you know, that could be attributed to Tallarico being a good candidate. It could also be attributed to Ken Paxton being widely regarded as the most corrupt guy in politics in recent history. Oh, yeah.

25:10 The devil incarnate.

25:12 Aidan McLaughlin with Vanity Fair went to a Republican Party event at like a fancy steakhouse Butterworth's in D.C. It was like an election night party. And obviously the Republicans were expecting it to go bad, but it went so much worse than they thought. And like the schadenfreude in this article is outrageous, but especially like the point in the article when it becomes clear that Tallarico is going to beat Paxton by like a sizable amount.

25:38 And here's a paragraph from that article.

25:41 As Ella Langley's Choose in Texas blared through the speakers, two men at the bar lamented the cruel irony of the song playing as Tallarico's comfortable lead expanded over Ken Paxton, his Republican challenger. I'm not trying to crash out, said one of the men, a Republican organizer of the party. But we nominated Hitler with Down syndrome.

25:56 And guess what? He lost. He lost.

25:58 And now we lose a Supreme Court justice. It's a fucking disaster. This is at an official Republican Party event. This Republican just called Ken Paxton. Hitler was– which like– there's a lot of things wrong with that. But wow.

26:13 Yeah.

26:14 Like the candidness. Yeah.

26:19 I mean it was an issue early on. People were worried that Paxton was a uniquely deficient candidate.

26:26 And he was.

26:27 Relative– to his alternative, John Cornyn, who he beat in the primary. But the margins in this race- Cornyn would have lost. It's just so large, even Cornyn would have lost. It would not have mattered if it had been Cornyn or Paxton. But for it to have been Paxton, it really added a lot of sugar to that Schengen-Freud sauce that you were tasting in that article.

26:50 And the way that they.

26:52 Campaigned towards the end was pretty despicable. I mean, they unleashed a whole set of Dirty tricks. You mentioned the trans issue earlier, Garrison. That was the last streak of the campaign all throughout October. It was either bogus allegations that Tallarico is in a mental hospital in Ohio, which had been ginned up by an account that is run by a criminal old woman, but it's using an AI-generated young woman's face. Classic stuff. And that got amplified by official campaign operatives incredibly. And when that was quickly batted down, it just became all about trans issues. And Paxson had interviewed on TV saying that's what they think their best line of attack is against Tallarico. And consequently, they leaned

27:43 into that. And now we're trying to figure out still who sent three million fraudulent mailers to Texans purporting to provide support to trans kids, but it was really actually just Republican operatives. So it was like a desperate election for these folks. And the issue is no longer resonating with Americans, at least in Texas, in the way that it maybe was four years ago. And I mean, Alarica was expected to be the one out of the pack probably to win, but I don't think anyone called it with this level of just obliteration on the Republican side.

28:22 Yeah.

28:24 No.

28:24 And it's important.

28:26 Obviously, gas prices are a big part of this, especially for Texans. Like when you tell them you can no longer afford to drive for gigantic diesel trucks, that pisses them off. It's bad for agriculture. It's bad for I mean, like cost of living is a part of this. Another part of this that I think has not gotten enough attention nationally is. is what Dan Patrick and Greg Abbott, the governor and lieutenant governor, did to the school voucher program in 2025.

28:49 Like they worked.

28:50 Very hard to ram through a school voucher program that was not super popular in a lot of like rural school districts, like because I think people just saw the danger it was going to do to their local schools. And he had to like really, Patrick especially had to like basically threaten a lot of like local legislators in order to like make this happen the way they wanted to.

29:12 And I think that cost them a lot of like political capital to going into this. And it really was like this churn of both Patrick and Abbott's decisions over the last like they've been in power for so long and so much has gotten worse. So you can't campaign and I'm going to fix everything when I've been in power for a decade. And then Trump making the situation just all that more calamitous. And I do agree, Stephen, that like, I think that Cornyn would have lost too.

29:41 But part of me wonders, did Paxton being such an obvious criminal, so obviously corrupt, and that being front and center in like the part, you know, the most funded election in the state, which was the election between Tallarico and Paxton, like, by far the most money was spent on that. And it got the most attention. Did the fact that Paxton was in the limelight as such a scumbag also maybe drag down enthusiasm for the Republican Party in a broader way of like, I'm wondering, were there people, you know, just kind of habitual Republican voters like a lot of my family? who were just looking at Paxton and the way he was– his past and the way he was performing the selection and going like, I don't

30:23 want to do this anymore. That compounding with the cost of living, compounding with the war, like I really do think– there was a stew of sickness that got boiled up by the Republican Party both in Texas and nationwide. And I think Texas got the biggest dose of it in some ways, right? Because there's so much Republican control, because there has been the Democratic Party has been useless for so long in Texas.

30:49 Zooming out. I mean, it's not just been a decade. It's been over three decades.

30:53 Yeah. Since.

30:54 Democrats have won a statewide seat. So Republicans have had dominance for, you know, as long as I've been able to speak in this state. And so the idea that they aren't responsible for where we are now is incredibly ridiculous.

31:10 It's been a long ass time since Ann Richards.

31:12 And to your point, Paxton was uniquely bad, but it wasn't just Paxton. I mean, low energy Paxton, criminal Paxton. We had this guy, Beau French, who.

31:23 Beau French.

31:24 He's running for basically a seat that regulates oil and gas on a three-seat commission.

31:30 It's the Texas Railroad Commission.

31:31 Stupid name.

31:32 It does not sound important, but is.

31:36 Yeah.

31:36 Sorry.

31:37 Anyway, he's running, and that was an unnecessary seat because they didn't even need to win it to still have a majority on the railroad commission. And yet, you know, a lot of people went in basically making it seem like he must win. And I'm going to be a little colorful in my language here, but he basically ran on a platform of I am a Hitler youth troop leader.

32:03 Like that's kind of how it came across. And so consequently, he was dragging everybody else around with him down. We had another person running for Congress, Brandon Herrera, who's a ridiculous gun tuber, did not. successfully moderate his online edginess, said a bunch of ridiculous stuff, wouldn't even walk back some of the stuff that he had said in the past.

32:26 And I mean, I think he suffered for it. And also he was running to represent a district that had one of the most horrific mass shootings at a school in recent history. And he was this guy who's out there downplaying or making light of political violence when it happens to people who he doesn't like.

32:46 And talking of like Hitler youth, he literally dressed up as a Nazi, right? Oh, yeah.

32:51 I profiled him. I mean, yeah, his YouTube stuff was incredibly over the top, really, really signaling language to extremists, whether it was nods to Rhodesia, to the Nazis, to the Boogaloos, you know, you name it. He really was in that online stew that was happening in the early 2020s. And that's how he rose to fame for being this edgy guy. And now that that has not landed. I mean, I think both him and Beau French mistook Twitter for the campaign.

33:28 Yep.

33:29 A lot of people did.

33:30 Exactly. Yeah, I think that's what I wanted to get to.

33:33 And I think we'll talk more about that, I mean, today and tomorrow, I'm sure. Speaking more on Texas, one thing I want to emphasize to people that surprised me, because again, I was open to the Tallarico winning, and I thought Gina Hinojosa had a chance. She was polling close enough that I was like, she might.

33:48 It's possible. But I kind of thought it was going to be.

33:52 Limited to those two big and highly publicized seats. I assume maybe the Democrats will do better than usual at the state level. this is not what we're seeing is not like a few big seats flip in a year in which like there's just a lot of things going against the Republicans in terms of inertia wise. Texas flipped like this was comprehensive across the board, rural districts, a lot of rural districts elected Democrats in a variety of state positions, too. Like I cannot overemphasize how comprehensive this is like the fact that Greg Abbott is out and lost to Hinojosa is, is huge. But one thing that is not getting as much attention outside of Texas and should, is that Dan Patrick, the Lieutenant governor got his ass

34:33 kicked too. And Dan Patrick is the fucking, like I've talked about Paxton is like the most corrupt guy in Texas politics. Patrick might be the smartest in terms of like right-wing politics. Like he is, he's a bad person, but he was a really good politician in terms of his ability to marshal power and like votes and get things done.

34:54 He got in.

34:54 He started in the Senate in 2006 and was reelected in 2010. And immediately after winning reelection, he created the Texas Tea Party caucus in the Texas state legislature. Like that was kind of like one of his first big political moves. He got elected. He ran in 2014 against David Dewhurst and became the lieutenant governor and immediately started pushing like some of the most like regressive movements. Like, especially on abortion bills, he was the guy who authored Texas's mandatory, and this is when he was in the Senate, mandatory ultrasound bill, which got signed into law in 2011 by Governor Perry, which forced women seeking an abortion to have an sonogram of the fetus taken before the abortion

35:33 was performed.

35:34 Holy shit.

35:35 Like, that's just one of the fucking hideous things he's responsible to. He's a big charter school guy. And I talked about how he rammed that stuff through. And he's also one of the things that's really important about him. He's been really good up until now. A big thing he would always do is he would endorse a bunch of like local candidates for like state positions. And he usually won like his picked candidates usually won. So Patrick had like a massive influence on how the Republican Party's like like human infrastructure got constructed in the state government.

36:06 And the fact that his ass is out, too, is a huge fucking deal. Like, I did not expect him to misjudge the moment and lose this election so badly, but he fucking did.

36:17 They definitely walked right into some landmines. I mean, flock have been a huge issue.

36:23 Yeah.

36:23 I mean, nationally, but also in Texas. Abbott was left holding the bag there. Dan Patrick went after pot during the most you know, liberalized form of pot laws in Texas, where it was actually pretty easy to get it. And you could get edibles, you could get whatever at these stores locally. And it was kind of a gray market area, thanks to the hemp bill.

36:45 Yeah, yeah, the hemp stuff, yeah.

36:47 He went hard against that. And he pissed off a whole swath of people.

36:51 It's like the vast majority of Texans, even rural Texans, love.

36:55 Yeah, and that crosses political lines. And so this is kind of the chickens coming home to roost. I mean, this... Part of the Republican Party that has taken power up until now in Texas was the furthest right version of the Republican Party. They've been having this civil war that's been playing out. These huge donors have been backing these primary challengers and consolidating power within the Republican Party. And there's this one influencer who posted this insane video recently.

37:28 The caption was like total chud victory. And in fact, that is what they have. They had a total chud victory within the Republican Party of Texas.

37:37 Yeah.

37:38 And they confused that victory with the actual general victory because they assumed that they had this inertia effect. And they could not be displaced in this way. Maybe they could get a couple seats picked off. Maybe they would have to try to get a Senate seat back.

37:56 But Texas will never flip. So I do want.

37:59 To caveat one thing, Robert. You're right to say that this has been a total shift.

38:03 Right.

38:03 I mean.

38:04 Really major regime change. But the Senate in Texas, the state Senate is still Republican majority. Yes, they still have one majority on the Supreme Court. So yes, you know, there's there's going to be some interesting stuff in the next two years. It's impossible to even really say what is possible at this point. Yes, yes.

38:21 And I don't mean to say flipped in the terms that and now Texas is blue forever. It could it could there's a very good chance and probably likeliest that it'll vote for Republican in 2028.

38:29 Like I'm not saying that.

38:31 But like, This is more than just, oh, Trump's doing bad this year, so a couple of Democrats slipped in, right? This is evidence of a deep structural rot in the Texas Republican Party, right? And I think it is what you were saying, Stephen. These guys convinced themselves– because the chuds were able to take over and dominate the state Republican Party– And because Texas just kind of habitually elected Republicans, they convinced themselves, well, what we're doing is popular and we can never lose, right? And it's not popular. Just as one last bit before we move on of Texas of schadenfreude, you can really be satisfied with the fact that Dan Patrick is out of his job, among many other shitty things. In 2016, Dan Patrick, after the Pulse

39:14 nightclub shooting in Orlando, is the guy who tweeted, Do not be deceived. God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. Galatians 6, 7. That's fucking Dan Patrick, and he's out on his ass.

39:25 Fuck him.

39:26 Any other things you wanted to add in, Stephen, from your write-up?

39:30 No, I mean, I just encourage people to maybe temper their expectations, right? Because just because it's a result, it doesn't mean that anything of major significance will even happen in the next two years. They have a bunch of roadblocks that will prevent some major changes, but I think we could see reasonably that some moderate Republicans crossing the aisle on some specific issues, maybe pot, for example, because those are easy and popular. You know, it's going to take at least another election or two in this same trajectory for Texas to really have like a reconstruction type situation at hand. But I do think, you know, these results make me believe that the election two years from now, it'll be competitive. Yeah, it depends on who's running. But Texas,

40:21 it's incredible. But Texas is very likely to be a battleground state.

40:24 Yeah, I feel the same way right now about Texas, honestly, that I do about Brazil in the wake of Lula's victory and that like there's a lot of problems. This does not mean it's going to be an easy road. Like there's you know, there's still a shitload of right wing power in Texas, but it's a fight now. They're not just going to be curb stomping the left Democrats, whatever you want to call them for the next however many years. There's actually going to be a struggle. Over what's going to happen in state politics. And that has not been the case since I've been alive. Anyway, I'm feeling good.

40:56 Let's go one more ad break and then we will return to talk about, I don't know, voter trends, miscellaneous other election news. There's a lot of news. It's a big election. Welcome back. We just discussed Greg Abbott, who is now out of a job.

41:23 I'll grab it.

41:24 Sure.

41:24 You know what? Sure. I'll give it to you. This is your day, Robert. You get it.

41:28 Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Gare.

41:32 But there's actually four other Republican governors who are also out of a job, or at least candidates who will not be taking a job, like Vivek Ramaswamy, who will not be the governor of Ohio. Amy Acton will be governor of Ohio. Fuck Ramaswamy. Oh, my God.

41:52 Yeah, what a disgusting campaign. Fuck me.

41:56 Vivek, it rhymes with loser.

42:02 It's it's amazing to see even a line for like some people in the modern Republican Party, like clearly not Trump because he endorsed that ad. But like the degree to which people are like, what the fuck, man, on his own side was nuts.

42:16 Acton has a lot of problems, a lot of the same kind of trans issues that a lot of these swing state candidates on the statewide races have. But what the Ramaswamy campaign did these past few weeks is so, so despicable that I want whatever is worse for him for the rest of his life. It's so gross. He ended up losing by eight points. I hope to never see him again. I'm sure I will. I'm sure I'll be sitting here two years from now talking about Ramaswamy.

42:45 Yeah, he's going to try something.

42:46 It's going to be hard to come back from rapping Lose Yourself at a rally event and knowing seemingly all the lyrics.

42:54 He sure did lose himself, though. Yeah, and then losing really bad. Yeah, and then losing. Unfortunately, he did not have one shot. He's had two already. He's fucked them both up, but he keeps coming back.

43:06 Yeah, I wish him only the worst.

43:08 Georgia.

43:09 Georgia. Former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms won the race for Georgia governor, beating Rick Jackson, who was running for a previously Republican-held position. Also won by around eight to nine points. Rob Sand beat Zach Lind in Iowa to also claim the governorship for the Democrats. The one that I really did not see coming, or at least didn't have on my radar... is Nevada, where Democrat Aaron Ford beat incumbent Republican Joe Lombardo by about seven points. These flips kind of go alongside of various state legislatures also flipping or at least moving towards the Democrats, which is the big trend of the night, around 15 to 30 point shifts towards the Democrats in both top ballot races

44:06 and down ballot races. Dems ended up gaining five new state trifectas after flipping Nevada's governor, the Minnesota and Michigan state houses, the Pennsylvania Senate, and flipping the Wisconsin Senate and House while holding onto control of the governor's office. And on top of that, balance was shifted to Democrats by winning the Arizona State Senate, the Georgia House, the New Hampshire House and Senate, North Carolina's House, and the Texas House, though Democrats fell short of a trifecta in those states. Kevin, do we want to discuss the West Coast?

44:47 Yeah, I can start with the West Coast. So, you know, in Oregon, things are generally a little bit boring. Not a whole lot really happened. It's possible that the Democrats might expand a little bit in the state legislature with their supermajority, but that hasn't necessarily gotten us a whole lot in the past few.

45:08 Years, unfortunately.

45:09 Yeah.

45:10 I don't know what you should expect from a slightly bigger Democratic lead in Oregon that's different from what we've got, which people are not happy with, by the way.

45:18 It's been a disappointing time, but I think one of the interesting things is like, despite Our Oregon governor, Tina Kotek, is like one of the least popular governors in the entire country. And even still, she's very bad at it. Yeah, she's really bad at it. And she gained it looks at least preliminary results are showing that she actually has an even wider margin on Christine Drazen. So it's it's just like it just didn't matter. Everybody just hates it.

45:45 Mostly Republican poll– sponsored polls that showed Drazen ahead during that period of time when she was polling ahead. And I kept– I always felt like.

45:54 That can't be right.

45:54 Like I know we all hate Tina Kotek, but that can't be right. They don't– no one likes Drazen.

46:00 No.

46:00 She's I mean, it's like I've been to events where they're talking. It's just like she's trying to sell like I am not a crazy Trumper. And it's like, well, we all know who you are.

46:08 Like she was her big ad that people were really worried about in the Democratic Party because they thought it was going to work. Some of them did was, hey, don't worry, I won't ban abortion. Like she literally ran an ad to be like, I'm not going to ban abortion if I if I'm the governor.

46:22 Trust me.

46:22 Yeah.

46:23 Like that's not a good sign. No, God, no. Yeah.

46:27 Other than that, like the. DSA candidates held on Portland City Council, so that's a pretty big win for them. And then I think there's one of the kind of more concerning DSA statehouse races that I think went to a ballot chase last time with Leslie Munoz. It looks like she is going to win, so they're going to expand a little bit in the state legislature. But that's kind of all that really happened in Oregon as far as I can tell right now. And then in Washington, well, I think we'll probably talk a little bit about the unfortunate prop results in California around the billionaire's tax, but we did get a win, it looks like, in Washington.

47:08 They voted not to repeal the millionaire's tax, so that's a nice little bit of a counter there.

47:15 Yeah.

47:16 Unfortunately, the other measure was the school sports by biological sex one, which is... really disappointing looking right now. It seems very unlikely that it would flip back, but basically anti-trans legislation, according to Como News, they said that it's a measure that would require students to undergo a physical exam documenting sex assigned at birth before participating in interscholastic sports, which, Jesus fucking Christ, I don't know how people... justify voting on these things.

47:54 I don't know.

47:55 This needs to get fucking sued. This needs to be a state Supreme Court case.

48:00 Yeah.

48:01 Yeah, yeah. This is massive.

48:03 Like another article from KNKX was saying the ACLU plans to fight it with discrimination lawsuits. And there's also questions remaining about implementation. But yeah, it's even stupider because there was another thing where like the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association, they don't even have account of how many like trans students are there's no they don't track this there's like this could be right like literally no it it's just insane it's ridiculous i don't yeah really.

48:34 Disappointing not enough people pay attention to ballot measures and yeah the fact that this thing won by a few hundred thousand votes i mean that is awful yeah yeah then there needed to be more organized against this and people in general they need to get The whole ballot measure process needs to be reformed. It's so confusing and it allows people to shoehorn all these things in that don't get the same attention as some of the other candidate races do.

49:03 No, and they're often mis- represented badly by the people who are getting signatures to get them on the ballot. And in terms of like how they're framed.

49:12 Yeah.

49:13 Even the phrasing.

49:14 Yeah.

49:15 It's issues. We have a lot of issues with that in the Northwest in particular. Yeah. It's been bad in California too.

49:19 Yeah.

49:20 Yeah, God.

49:21 And this Washington trans sports restriction is not the only one of its kind that passed this election. No. One in Arizona, one in Colorado, and then another proposition in Colorado prohibiting, quote, surgeries to alter a minor's sex characteristics. Yeah. Which similarly passed by just like less than 100,000 votes as of time of recording. These are very small margins, but they did pass. And that is bad.

49:47 Yeah, that's what matters.

49:49 Which is very interesting is there was something similar in Missouri, which did not pass. There was a constitutional amendment to repeal the right to abortion and prohibit gender transition care for minors, which did not pass. And this is a really interesting example of something not passing in Missouri, but passing in Washington state.

50:08 You said it was an abortion, was it an abortion ban and an anti, were those two bills or one?

50:13 They crammed them together, yeah.

50:14 Okay, well, yeah, that helps probably explain it, yeah.

50:18 Another small thing in the Northwest, I did see that Idaho did not- I was about to mention that, yeah.

50:23 I think they.

50:24 Also did not, or they blocked abortion access. I forget exactly, James, you might know a little better than me, but.

50:29 Yeah, it was Prop 1, which Idaho voters would amend state law to establish like a right to abortion- up to the point where the fetus is viable.

50:40 Yeah.

50:40 Idaho, of course, also voted for its state gun yesterday. Not sure how that went down for them.

50:45 Are you serious?

50:46 Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yes, they did, but they were all bad.

50:50 None of them are, for one thing, none of them are Idaho guns, although a couple of them were made by a Mormon, and Idaho has a large Mormon population, but Yep. None of them are appropriate because the state gun for Idaho should be the same state gun that I approve of for Oregon, the life card, which is a, it looks like a little, like a card you'd fit in your wallet, but it unfolds into a.

51:11 380 or a.

51:11 22 or a.

51:11 32.

51:11 I think it's a.

51:12 22.

51:12 No, they have three calibers now, James.

51:13 Oh, they have the three calibers.

51:14 But there's no trigger guard, which means there's nothing between your gun firing and the world but air. And I think that perfectly embodies the frontier spirit of the Northwest, you know?

51:26 People seem really shocked by the state gun thing. Tons of states already have state guns. Tennessee's is a stupidest. I think it's like the Barrett Light 50 Cal. That's just dumb.

51:35 That's just like Reddit shit.

51:37 Fuck off.

51:39 One last piece of Northwest election news I wanted to cover. So in the Portland City Council races, because we had several people up for election there, Mitch Green is an economist who represents District 4. And he got earlier this year, a right wing reporter dug up some old tweets from his Twitter in 2022.

51:59 I wouldn't call him a reporter, but.

52:01 Yeah, a reporter, quote unquote, right? A blogger, Max Steele.

52:05 Yeah.

52:06 Found some posts that he, Mitch had deleted in 2022, I guess, in preparation for his political career, but he posted into 2020 and 2021 during the protests. And he had expressed his pure hatred for the Portland police. And so that got brought up and there was a, there were like billboards outside of like my place and like a bunch of places in Portland that have like Mitch's hatred of police or also he was laid on taxes once.

52:28 He had a fire in his yard when he shouldn't have had a fire in his yard. Like crazy shit.

52:32 Like a normal Portlander.

52:34 Right.

52:35 Yeah.

52:35 What a fucking nextdoor.com coded fucking campaign.

52:38 It's all massive like business lobby pack spending and stuff that's all like sheltered and different.

52:43 Yeah.

52:44 It's crazy.

52:45 And it didn't work.

52:46 Mitch won re-election along with the other people that he was running alongside the other progressives.

52:51 Yeah, he was one of like the six Oregon statewide DSA candidates. Partly, I think generally it was a good response when he was asked like, do you still stand by your pure hatred for the Portland police? He said, I would not characterize the police today that way. I know some police officers now because I'm a city counselor.

53:06 I've met some police officers who I think genuinely care about our city. I do want a world where we abolish the police. That's what I'm trying to build.

53:13 So he kind of hemmed by saying there's some good ones, but also I want to abolish them. So I don't know. More or less on balance, good. And I'm glad he won real. I'm glad the fucking massive ad campaign against him didn't work because it was really gross.

53:27 Anyway, that's all I got.

53:28 Funny note on that.

53:29 I actually wrote a story on my sub stack not too long ago about how his donations massively went up after that story ran.

53:36 Yeah.

53:39 It made me want to. That's awesome.

53:41 Should I take us to something positive on data centers?

53:45 Yes. Let's talk about some good proposition or ballot measures.

53:49 Oh, are we building?

53:49 I love data centers. Are we building a new one?

53:51 The short of it is that data center just got absolutely clobbered in this election. According to CNBC, there were 41 data center-related ballot measures on the docket across 10 different states, 21 of which were in Ohio. And All but one of those failed, or at least in the direction. So everybody voted against data centers. The one that did pass was in Harwood, North Dakota, where voters went against the charter amendment, which required additional review before city approval of industrial projects, which includes data centers.

54:25 A lot of these are like.

54:26 Local jurisdictional things. But I think something that was interesting is while a lot of the vote counts are quite small, in nearly all of the cases, the margins were Very wide. I think I was looking at Ballotpedia and only one of them, I think, was within 10 points.

54:43 They were all like huge.

54:45 That makes sense.

54:46 Yeah.

54:47 Among the people who care about this issue, they really care about this issue.

54:50 Yeah.

54:50 Yeah.

54:52 I personally am shocked.

54:54 And I really, I feel like the only explanation for this is that people haven't read quite enough articles by AI company CEOs talking about how their product is going to kill everybody. You know, one more of those will convince people that data centers, more data centers are good.

55:08 Yeah.

55:10 It went so poorly for them that even Elon Musk posted last night, the data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now.

55:18 Which hopefully... That's as real as everything else you advocate, Elon.

55:22 Yeah.

55:24 I think this is just kind of an interesting position for these companies. With Ohio, with 21 of these failing, and they were, I guess, according to CNBC, the most business-friendly state in the nation last year, OpenAI has a giant project coming in there. But this is just a massive setback. And there was the crypto AI and gambling industry.

55:47 lobby spent hundreds of millions of dollars this year. And so having, and I think a lot of that might, might have gone more into like candidate races. I don't know exactly how this would have worked with measures, but basically this, you know, follows the polling on data centers. And I just think it'll be interesting to see how this plays out with how shaky things are in the stock market. And it's like data, these companies do not need more barriers to, to building compute capacity right now.

56:17 That is like really bad for them.

56:19 And this is like, to caveat off of your point, this is something that like the AI and crypto industries spent a shitload on this on the midterms, and it nearly all failed.

56:31 Like massive disasters.

56:32 There's a really good Gizmodo article on this by Bruce Gill, and I'm going to read just a brief quote from that. Crypto and AI-focused super PACs spent $ 112 million supporting and opposing candidates in the general election alone, according to Tech Influence Watch. As of Wednesday morning, $ 74. 7 million of that spending had gone toward losing candidates or efforts to defeat winning candidates. The losses came despite an influx of money from Silicon Valley into this year's elections. Overall, crypto and AI companies and employees contributed more than $ 506 million to political committees this election cycle, according to Tech Influence Watch's estimates. Meanwhile, industry-focused PAC spent nearly $ 250 million on the federal elections,

57:07 including primaries. And just the vast majority of that has been completely disastrous. In Ohio, Sherrod Brown won his Senate seat against John Husted, even though the crypto industry put a bunch of money, like $ 64 million into supporting Husted. $ 64 million into one campaign by the crypto industry.

57:30 All my apes gone. Yeah.

57:32 Oh, and that's not all.

57:33 Elon Musk's backed Senate leadership fund spent another $ 95. 6 million on the race trying to beat Brown.

57:40 Oh, that's good. Oh, that's good.

57:42 Oh.

57:42 And then Musk's America pack spent almost $ 10 million. Like, they lot through so much money into beating Sherrod Brown.

57:49 It just did fucking nothing.

57:50 Oh, that makes me so happy. It's so funny.

57:54 They also put, there was like the AI-focused Building the Future in America mission pack put almost $ 5 million into supporting Darlene Graham's campaign.

58:03 Ooh!

58:06 Good bet, guys. Good bet, guys.

58:08 That makes sense because out of all these races that I was going through last night, both Sherrod Brown and Annie Andrews had the strongest anti-AI stuff, with the exception of Al Sayed, who's had very strong AI policies.

58:23 Yeah. And they did have some successes, but it was mostly in not really competitive races. The one that was, that's kind of meaningful, is they did the Defend American Jobs PAC, which was an AI.

58:35 industry, backed.

58:36 One, put like $ 14 million almost into Senator Pete Ricketts' campaign in Nebraska, and he did win.

58:42 That is something I did want to mention. Yes, in Nebraska, Dan Osborne was running as an independent on like a working class labor platform. And this was very competitive in the polls, but Ricketts ended up really, really pulling ahead at the end. And so this Senate seat stayed stayed Republican. Besides Angie Nixon, this is kind of one of the big kind of losses for the night, you could say.

59:07 Or at least one of the examples of Republicans being able to hold on to power.

59:11 Yes. Yeah, let's talk about California briefly, right? So I guess the big news out of California is it's not looking good for Prop 40. California overall, disappointing. And we'll get into this later, but California is what happens when the Democrats feel safe. And what we saw here, it's like a There are a lot of votes still to be counted in California. I should probably lead with that, right?

59:33 Right now, Prop 40. Prop 40 was a one-time 5% tax on individuals or trusts that had assets over $ 1 billion. There are less than 300 billionaires in California. Currently, no, it's leading with 55.6% of the vote. According to the AP, 44.4%.

59:53 Yes.

59:53 Bummer.

59:58 California's ballot had a number of props that sought to directly cancel or invalidate prop 40, like suggesting that the wealthy were afraid, right? Looking by county, I was looking at a county breakdown, a prop 40. It succeeded in LA County. Otherwise, there are very few, it succeeded in like Alameda County and like Mendocino County, Yolo County, Monterey, like less big urban counties. For instance, it did not succeed at this point in San Diego County. There was obviously a lot of spending against Prop 40. Gavin Newsom has also been opposed to it. California continues to be a disappointment in every aspect. It's very corporate Dems here.

1:00:46 We didn't really see... at a statewide level, that swing towards more progressive Democrats that we have seen in other places. In terms of local races, Marnie Van Wilpert beat Jim Desmond, which Desmond was taking over Daryl Issa's seat. Issa has been a pretty hard caller. He's not a California Republican. Well, he is obviously a Republican for California, but he's a Trumper.

1:01:12 For the most part, Duncan Hunter had previously held a version of that. It's been redrawn, right? California redrew a number of districts. But Duncan Hunter, people will remember, A, for being one of the more far-right members of Congress, B, for buying flights for his bunny rabbit and spending campaign funds on Steam games, among other things. Respect.

1:01:33 Most useful Republican campaign expenditure.

1:01:36 Sorry.

1:01:39 I had to say.

1:01:40 Yeah, right. You know what? If they took that money and they spent it all on Steam games, I wouldn't complain. You know, they're a worse thing for them to spend their money on. Generally, California has seen its characteristic, like highly democratic, right? I think there were, I'm seeing four house districts that returned Republicans, the rest Democrats, right? California lines were redrawn. And so some of these Republicans have pretty strong, it's not like a, it's not like a one for one comparison, right. But we can look at like how that area would have voted before, but we, we see like strong Germany, strong results for Republicans where they've won, but everywhere else, big wins for Democrats. I

1:02:23 did want to mention in San Diego news that yesterday, a little election day treat for us San Diegans. The first process of recalling a mayor in California is to publish your intent. to serve a recall notice and a group published intent to serve a recall notice for Todd Gloria. Of course, Todd's supporters in the Republican Party have immediately closed ranks behind that guy. But for those who are not familiar, Todd Gloria, San Diego's mayor, Another example of what happens in California, where you get people running on supposedly progressive values and then turning out to be massive grifters, liars and chuds. So the group cited Gloria's failure to address our increasing crisis of people living on the street

1:03:07 and not having access to services and his like persistent real estate grift. It'll be really interesting. I think Gloria, I know this can seem like a small local thing at a time when it's been a massive swing in national politics. Gloria, at least for me, really represents the pro-genocide corporate Democrats who have failed in 2024 specifically to inspire people to turn out to vote for them because they seem so out of touch, because they didn't offer solutions to problems that people had. We spoke about this on ED a couple of weeks ago, right? But Gloria is probably Flock Camera's strongest defender, and he has absolutely refused to concede on that. When it comes to kind of carceral, out-of-touch liberalism, I see him as like a

1:03:53 totem of that. And so, although he will term out at the end of this term Although this recall will be expensive, I think it sends a really important notice to the Democratic Party that this kind of aloof, out of touch, giving all our money to the cops liberalism is not what people want in 2028. And I do think there's a real risk of Democrats falling back into well-worn patterns of doing that shit. So he has to be served the recall notice by the 8th, then he has a chance to respond. It won't be until the third or fourth week of this month that people will actually begin gathering information. big in-gathering signatures, and it would have to be 15% of the electorate from the last election.

1:04:33 I'm not sure if that's the last election when they served the notice or the last election at the time that they published it. I'm wondering if that's why they published it on election day, because the turnout was relatively high for a midterm election, right? To get a lower number, but it would be around... like 120, 130,000 voters that they would need to sign that signature to trigger a recall.

1:04:53 And I believe we're still working out if it will be recalled then election, or if it would be recall and election. You see what I mean? So I'll keep updated on that. It's always a fairly predictable and disappointing result in California. We're still waiting on LA mayor. It's very close right now. The last I saw it was like 51 to 49. I don't know if anyone's been looking at it while we've been recording.

1:05:18 Yeah. It's the same. There's about a 17,000 vote difference with still almost half a million votes to come in.

1:05:28 Right.

1:05:28 That's ramen leading bass, which would be a major upset for the corporate Dem contingent. Wait, did you say ramen is leading?

1:05:36 Yes, ramen is leading.

1:05:38 Oh, correct.

1:05:38 Oh, wow.

1:05:38 By 17,000 votes.

1:05:38 Yeah. Yeah.

1:05:42 Yes, yeah, yeah. It looked a lot better for Bass when we went to bed last night. Yeah, I didn't check. Okay, that's good. So, yeah, that will be a big win for the LADSA.

1:05:52 Hopefully we'll know by Thanksgiving, California.

1:05:58 We'll see. Yeah, but it would be... Ramen winning LA would be a really interesting, like we've got Mandami in New York, right? Like seeing the two, I think the two most popular cities in the US, I would imagine, going both to DSA mares, I think would set a really interesting trajectory going into 2028.

1:06:21 Yeah.

1:06:22 I can bring some on the ground reporting too. I stopped by the DSA thing in Portland last night and there's some speculation about them trying to run mitch for mayor mitch green for mayor which is uh who knows if that's even a good idea at all.

1:06:38 But no i think like uh similarly in san diego right like who will we get if they were called tall gloria yeah uh like this this like dsa local politics running on economic issues and local issues has been a positive pathway for them.

1:06:53 This is something we'll talk a lot about these probably these next few weeks is like what the left should do or what the left is doing. Now that Democrats have this majority, how can people ensure that Democrats will actually do things that are useful once they have this majority? This will be kind of an ongoing discussion these next few months and years, frankly.

1:07:16 I mean, the immediate thing that needs to happen, and we've already had a couple of newly elected House members make comments along the lines of like, lawyer up to members of the Trump administration. And that's what I want to see immediately is investigations, right? I want to see investigations. I want to see attempts at impeaching like figures, even if they don't go after Trump himself. I want to see like a dogged and vicious attempt to enact consequences for like Doge, for Pete Hegseth, for people in the DOJ, for ICE, like whatever they can do. And they'll be limited, obviously, while Trump is president. But I want to see that shit starting now. Like they need to be striking back.

1:07:58 Yeah.

1:07:59 One more on California before I forget. Prop 3 is looking good. Prop 3 would extend a tax. The tax was enacted in 2012, but it was set to expire in 2031. And that is, it has a higher income tax for top earners. So it's 10.3% over 360 grand, 12.3% over 721 grand individual income. So at least we kept that.

1:08:22 A lot of that is ring fence for public schools with a little bit of it going to community colleges.

1:08:28 Nice.

1:08:29 So that's a good one.

1:08:30 We'll probably discuss voter trends more also in these next few weeks. But I mean, TLDR, the whole country shifted towards the Democrats by like 15 to 30 points, depending on the district.

1:08:43 Yes. And again, I'm sure we'll talk more, but like young people seem to, or young men seem to have shifted 28 points away from Republicans towards Democrats.

1:08:52 Which is crazy, right?

1:08:53 Men 18 to 29 shift 38 points.

1:08:54 Jesus.

1:08:54 Jesus. God.

1:08:55 Yeah.

1:09:00 Yeah.

1:09:01 And the numbers weren't even that insane last night, but that came up on Steve Bannon's radio show or podcast when he was doing his election night coverage.

1:09:09 And someone pointed out to him, actually, a.

1:09:13 Majority of young men are voting for The Democrats right now, like we've lost them. And Bannon said that can't be right. Like those numbers have to be wrong because he was so convinced that that was a permanent majority that they'd gained in 2024, that like they had captured young men.

1:09:28 Yeah.

1:09:29 And that's what all their messaging has been. That's all of their fucking, like, based Tungus memes on Twitter. Their whole comms strategy is like... Yeah, yeah.

1:09:39 I can't overemphasize a huge number of the most influential, like, thought leaders on the conservative right on Twitter convinced themselves that a mix of memes about a gender-bent Draco Malfoy and fucking Anakin Skywalker had handed them the election. they walked themselves into that just in the same way that they convinced themselves that like the trans stuff or like Harambe was how they won in 2016. And like, The degree to which they keep convincing– and in 2024, they were like, oh, it was the anti-trans messaging that like won it for us. The degree to which they convince themselves that whatever this little bubble in Twitter is talking about is what the nation gives a shit about.

1:10:16 Yeah.

1:10:16 Has really bit them in the ass this time, right?

1:10:20 Like they were able to kind of ignore reality because in general, things were so bad for any incumbent in 2024.

1:10:27 Yeah.

1:10:28 But there's none of that shielding left.

1:10:30 Right.

1:10:30 They're left purely with the consequences of their actions and the fact that they have convinced themselves of a fantasy that like weirdos on Twitter who spend all of their time like AI generating fucking images of characters from 25 year old movies is like the normal American voter.

1:10:48 Like that's that's what they did. That's part of why they lost.

1:10:53 Yeah, it's pretty bleak. Two years of prefrontal cortex development will go a long way for my fellow young white lads, I guess. Hopefully.

1:11:03 Jesus.

1:11:06 I do want to point out that the NBC exit polls are pretty fascinating.

1:11:11 Yep.

1:11:13 And if you look at young voters, 18 to 29... one third of them said, yes, they consider themselves a democratic socialist. And 99% of those people said they were Democrats and only 9% said they were MAGA. So who would have predicted that Anakin posting and Malfoy posting would be in parallel with this massive socialist swing? I mean, you don't have to be too vulgar about it, but basically every older person that gets out of the voting base is losing. It's like two thirds less of a vote for a socialist. And then there's like, you know, many more people who are aging in who are leaning socialist.

1:12:03 So it is dramatically backfired. I mean, it is the entire opposite of what these people wanted. It is truly their worst fears coming to pass, which is just delightful to watch.

1:12:14 No, 17% of the electorate identified as socialists.

1:12:19 Yeah.

1:12:19 It's wild. It's pretty shocking. And I mean, we would be remiss to mention the massive swings in Hispanic votes towards the Democrats that played a big part in Florida, getting Angie Nixon closer and pushing Tallarico way over the edge in Texas. Based on everything ICE has been doing the past few years, this was to be expected, but the extent to which a 28-point swing- Good lord. Really- really large. Similarly, I mentioned at the top of the episode how Republicans were not able to gain any seats from their redistricting measures. And if anything, all the redistricting did was enrage people. It really pissed people off. And generate massive, massive black voter turnout. Because- Republicans were trying

1:13:05 to take away their ability to vote, to have their votes matter.

1:13:09 Yeah.

1:13:10 And that caused a huge black turnout and a big swing also towards Democrats. The other thing it did, and this is something that's really funny, is because Republicans were trying to make more Trump districts, what they ended up doing is diluting their own mega Trump voters across multiple districts, which then in North Carolina... because of the big turnout for Democrats, made Democrats take districts that were previously Republican strongholds.

1:13:40 So it was a complete backfiring of redistricting. They diluted their own support by trying to dilute Black people's ability to have their votes matter.

1:13:50 No, the- The tighter they clenched their grip, the more systems slipped through their fingers, right?

1:13:56 It's all Star Wars, man.

1:13:58 The whole election is Star Wars.

1:14:00 Yep, yep.

1:14:01 They convinced themselves not just that, yeah, this has been a permanent realignment, and now we can do anything, and we can laugh about it. We can laugh about how cruel we're being. We can laugh about the people we're killing. We can laugh about the programs we're cutting, the lives we're destroying, and no one will ever– make us stand for it, like accountable for it.

1:14:21 They thought they could do all this bullshit the past two years and just get away with it. That they would not face consequences for it.

1:14:26 Because they thought people loved it.

1:14:28 Yeah, they thought they were locked in forever.

1:14:30 Because they thought their entire electorate was like 15% of the Republican Party who were the craziest people in the world, right?

1:14:36 Yeah, and to an extent they're still fucking doing it. I'm not sure if you saw that Mark Wayne Mullen went on Twitter today to post deportations will continue.

1:14:46 Yeah, I'm sure they will. Like, yeah, they will, right?

1:14:50 Like, they will go wild with the executive branch shit that they think they can get away with.

1:14:55 Yeah.

1:14:55 Because why not?

1:14:56 Yeah, they're going to go as hard as they think they can get away with. The only way it might stop and mitigate that is depending on, like, how... afraid they are of being prosecuted after this, which I am seeing a lot of talk about, quite frankly.

1:15:09 Yeah.

1:15:09 And that might do some, that might actually mitigate how, what they're willing to do, right?

1:15:15 Like, I don't know.

1:15:16 One of the things that's been interesting to me is that despite all of the talk ahead of this is like, oh, is Trump going to, are they going to recognize the results of the election? You know, are they going to be sending troops out to stop this if it goes against them? That talk dropped on the right when it became clear how big a loss this was.

1:15:32 Within hours.

1:15:33 Yeah.

1:15:33 Yeah.

1:15:34 I feel like a bit of a dumbass with my episode yesterday because it.

1:15:39 Was like, oh, there's going to be.

1:15:41 I'm sure they'll still come after various things, but it's like, oh, wow, it really was just like an absolute blue nami.

1:15:47 Too big to rip. Yeah.

1:15:49 I mean, just to end on that note, we were thinking here in Texas that one of the better outcomes might actually be Greg Abbott winning and, you know, Tallarico winning because... If it's a split vote, they can't cry wolf with the same effect. But, I mean, we ended up getting the same effect, but just through a different mechanism, which is amazing.

1:16:11 They all lost.

1:16:13 If all politics has to be Star Wars, I want to see a lot more glup shittos. I don't want to see fascist Anakin. I want to know who... He's the glupshiddo, the new glupshiddo of this.

1:16:24 It's a lot, you know, a lot of glupshiddos came out of the woodwork to win it for, for the Democrats last night.

1:16:31 Oops, all glupshiddos. Before we go, I do want to mention, they're like, just we glupshiddo, sorry. Newsome to glupshiddo.

1:16:42 Yeah. Really good night for indigenous candidates, right?

1:16:45 Yeah.

1:16:46 Deb Haaland. governor in new mexico nez is looking pretty good like former chairman of the navajo nation it remains to be seen in arizona right peggy uh flanagan in minnesota like i was talking to some friends uh some some yaki friends yesterday about like incredible turnout in indigenous communities like at least where they were uh and from what i've heard it was it was pretty high everywhere and uh Yeah, that's good to see. Trump has been fucking extensively with indigenous people, their rights and their land.

1:17:21 It's good to see them showing up and it's good to see indigenous candidates being returned at a state level.

1:17:26 We'll talk more about some of this sort of stuff where the Democrats will do next, that kind of thing, in tomorrow's edition of Executive Disorder, as well as some non-election related stories to help get a general sense of what's going on in the world. But before we close... Steven, where can people find your work, especially to keep up on the politics of Texas? And who sent those fucking mailers?

1:17:49 God, we are going to get to the bottom of those mailers, even if it may not be as consequential. To Robert's point, the accountability must continue. We must get to the bottom of who is behind that so their feet can be held to the fire. You can find my reporting often at the Texas Observer. But if you just Google my Italian ass name, you can find my website.

1:18:12 And all my articles get consolidated there because I do write for a few different outlets. And, you know, I'm always excited to be on the show with you all. So thanks for having me. Yeah.

1:18:24 Thank you for holding Texas down.

1:18:26 How about you, Kevin? Where can people find your coverage of the places with pine trees and rain?

1:18:33 Yeah, I'm on like all the social media channels at Kevin H.

1:18:37 Foster.

1:18:38 And then my sub stack is last week in hell. And this week, it's not the most fitting name because it seems like things have generally gone okay.

1:18:47 But this week in purgatory yeah this week in purgatory one level up baby one level up at a.

1:18:54 Time we're clawing our way out.

1:18:57 That does it for us here at it could happen here we'll see you tomorrow for another episode of executive disorder we reported the news.

1:19:06 We reported the news

1:19:16 Thanks for listening.